Topic: How to Get Your Brain to Focus | Chris Bailey | TEDxManchester

In this video, I found that the speaker’s slides not only use cognitive load theory but also use some multimedia principles.

The speaker uses cognitive load theory to enable the audience to quickly understand the topic of the speech, which can make the audience better focus on the speaker. For example, his slides are basically only a few keywords or a short sentence.

The first multimedia principle used in this video is that the coherence principle. When the speaker talked about people thinking of many brilliant ideas in the bath, a picture of the bathroom also appeared on the slide. Although there is only one picture in this slide, this picture plus the speaker’s description makes me immersive.

The signaling principle is the second multimedia principle he used in the video. This speaker is very good at using the contrast of font size and bright colors to grab the audience’s attention. For example, in one of the slides, he used a black background and white fonts to highlight the idea of his speech, and he made the number in the sentence more conspicuous so that the audience was immediately attracted by that number.

The last multimedia principle used in the video is the contiguity principle. Whenever the speaker talks about a different point of view, the slides will be changed at the same time. The text and pictures in the slides are also related to the content of the speaker’s speech.